The Decline Of Breadwinner Jobs Has Resulted In The Longest Bread Lines In American History


Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
July 10, 2013

As the number of good jobs continues to decline, the number of Americans that cannot take care of themselves without government assistance continues to explode. On Friday, we learned that the U.S. economy added “195,000 jobs” last month. But when you look deeper at the numbers, another story emerges. Last month, the U.S. economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs. Overall, the U.S. economy has only added 130,000 full-time jobs in 2013, but it takes about 90,000 full-time jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So we are losing quite a bit of ground as far as full-time jobs are concerned. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has added more than 500,000 part-time jobs so far this year. Unfortunately, there are very, very few part-time and temp jobs that can be considered “breadwinner jobs”. Part-time jobs are great for teenagers, university students and elderly people that only want to work a limited number of hours, but what most Americans need are good paying full-time jobs with benefits that will allow them to take care of their families. Unfortunately, those jobs are continually becoming a smaller part of our economy.

As David Stockman has noted, the U.S. economy has only regained 200,000 of the 5.6 million breadwinner jobs that were lost during the last recession…

By September 2012, the S&P 500 was up by 115 percent from its recession lows and had recovered all of its losses from the peak of the second Greenspan bubble. By contrast, only 200,000 of the 5.6 million lost breadwinner jobs had been recovered by that same point in time. To be sure, the Fed’s Wall Street shills breathlessly reported the improved jobs “print” every month, picking and choosing starting and ending points and using continuously revised and seasonally maladjusted data to support that illusion. Yet the fundamentals with respect to breadwinner jobs could not be obfuscated.

This is a big problem. As I wrote about the other day, the quality of jobs in America is falling very fast. Only 47 percent of all adults in the United States have a full-time job at this point, and 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

Meanwhile, the number of part-time jobs has hit an all-time record high, and the number of temp jobs is absolutely exploding.

Incredibly, the number of temp jobs has increased by more than 50 percent since the end of the recession. Approximately 10 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were temp jobs, but close to 20 percent of the jobs gained since then have been temp jobs.

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in our economy. Full-time jobs are on the decline. Part-time and temp jobs are on the rise.

In fact, the second largest employer in the United States is now a temp agency. Kelly Services has become the second largest employer in the country after Wal-Mart.

But it is really hard to pay the bills stocking shelves at Wal-Mart or working temp jobs for Kelly Services.

Unfortunately, these days millions of American workers find themselves having to take whatever they can find. We live during a period of chronic unemployment. In fact, according to John Williams of shadowstats.com, unemployment in the United States is now higher than it was at any point during the last recession after you factor in discouraged workers and workers that have taken part-time jobs for economic reasons.

So why don’t more Americans go out and start businesses and create their own jobs?

Unfortunately, thanks to the federal government, state governments and local governments, the environment for small businesses in America today is incredibly toxic. In fact, the percentage of self-employed workers in this country is at an all-time record low.

As a result of everything that I have discussed above, more Americans than ever find that they cannot take care of themselves without government assistance.

I have often written about the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has skyrocketed in recent years. In the year 2000, there were only 17 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are more than47 million Americans on food stamps.

But the number of Americans that are dependent on our “modern day bread lines” is actually far higher than that.

According to a recent CNS News article, a total of 101 million Americans are enrolled in food assistance programs. The following are some of the staggering numbers for some of these programs…

The National School Lunch program provides 32 million students with low-cost or no-cost meals daily; 10.6 million participate in the School Breakfast Program; and 8.9 million receive benefits from the Woman, Infants and Children (WIC) program each month, the latter designed for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women, as well as children younger than 5 years old.

In addition, 3.3 million children at day care centers receive snacks through the Child and Adult Care Food Program.

There’s also a Special Milk Program for schools and a Summer Food Service Program, through which 2.3 million children received aid in July 2011 during summer vacation.

At farmer’s markets, 864,000 seniors receive benefits to purchase food and 1.9 million women and children use coupons from the program.

Yes, there is some overlap in some of these programs. So the actual number of Americans receiving food assistance is going to be less than 101 million.

But clearly something has gone horribly wrong. Our economy is not producing enough good jobs, and more Americans than ever cannot take care of themselves as a result.

This is not normal. What we are witnessing is the slow-motion collapse of the middle class. The number of Americans that are dependent on the government for their daily bread is so large that it is difficult to comprehend. The following are a few statistics from my recent article entitled “21 Facts About Rising Government Dependence In America That Will Blow Your Mind“…

-Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.

-Today, the number of Americans on food stamps exceeds the entire population of the nation of Spain.

-According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

You can read the rest of that article right here.

So what is the solution?

Well, we need a lot more full-time “breadwinner jobs” that will enable men and women to be able to take care of their families.

Unfortunately, we continue to ship millions of good jobs overseas, and our politicians continue to pursue policies which are making the business environment in this country very toxic.

There is not going to be any easy way to fix all of this. We should have seen a nice bounce in the employment numbers during this so-called “recovery”, but that did not happen. And now the next wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching, and the employment crisis in this country is going to become a lot more painful.

I hate to say it, but there are also issues with being able to do breadwinner type jobs and the fact that even training for them is not as common as it should be in many of our schools. Our young men probably ought to learn some of the real man jobs which others just plain can't do. I remember years ago leaving a sales job with its bullshit office politics and clients who always preferred to deal with the blonde chick with big tits, rather than the "ex-Marine guy" even though I had been hired on the military pedigree sort of by on of Marcinko's old team members. It was not the bosses, and far as I know

In my book, the breadwinner jobs in trades are the kinds of things that a lot of people CANNOT do. I just removed myself from a job that unfortunately got to that level and hopefully did not screw me up with the company, but it involved running a scissor lift up to maximum height to work on electrical boxes in the ceiling of a big box store. For some reason I had been thinking Home Depot, it turned out to be one of the electronics stores. So with very little experience on that piece of equipment, I needed to be able to maneuver the machine with no margin of error close to its maximum extension height (around 30 feet) around shelves and display cases stocked with thousands of dollars of electronics, and if I crash, its on my dime. That, and those things get mighty wobbly with a guy my weight on one the higher it goes, with the other guys doing the monkey trick daredevel thing to get at some of the cables and boxes crammed around beams in odd places before the shelves and displays had been installed.

I got to thinking through my education, and can't think of a single course in a single high school or even many of the junior colleges where they went over how to run those machines, and while I figured out the basic controls pretty quickly, it was straight to the precision driving and gutsy stuff which screwed with my equilibrium. You look at the new machines out there, or even the old machines, and nobody wants to risk new equipment on training anyone, so the younger people are just plain screwed. I was on a job where they just assumed I knew that stuff because of my age, but there are limits to "fake it until you make it" which tend to shake out three stories up on an 11 hour night shift.

The other leg of the stool is the Bond market is dropping like a rock. So who cares? You all should.

Back before the big Auto take overs many municipalities invested their retirement accounts in Corporations too big to fail. The Mr Obama made the decision that regardless of SEC rules and law that the Auto Corporations would pay the Union demands, Executive Parachutes, and taxes before they paid the preferred stock.

Mr Obama's comment this will only harm the rich investor speculators! Those were the municipalities. The Firemen;s funds. The police benevolent funds. The municipalities had to issue Bonds to resettle the employee retirement funds.

These Bonds we found out on Friday last were dropping meant little to us. These Bonds are held by Insurance Companies, Public Utilities, etc to pay their employees retirement funds.

When the Fed raised the cost for these Bonds to renew they made them untradable. Since they don't get renewed the fund expenses start drawing down the principals. The funds become an expense not an investment. When they get to some point they become unsalable and the source of the funds get eaten by the fees.

These bonds are also used by some states to back up the unemployment insurance.

Cloward-Pivens

The “McDonald’s Budget”: Laughably Unrealistic But Also Deeply Tragic


Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
July 18, 2013

Can you support a family on $2,000 a month? Recently, McDonald’s and Visa teamed up to launch a website that is intended to help employees of McDonald’s manage their money. The aspect of the website that is getting a tremendous amount of national attention is the “McDonald’s Budget” which is a sample monthly budget which is designed to help workers plan their spending. You can see a copy of it for yourself right here. This budget is laughably unrealistic, but it is also deeply tragic, because there are tens of millions of American workers that are actually trying to raise families on this kind of an income.

The first thing that you will notice about the McDonald’s Budget is that it expects workers to have two jobs. It is an open admission that working at McDonald’s is not enough to survive. So this budget assumes that the worker will take on a second job which will pay nearly as much as the first one does. Assuming that both jobs pay about the minimum wage, the budget will require about 70 to 80 hours of work every week.

People can put in those kind of hours for a time, but after a while your body starts to break down. I have been there, and I have known many others that have been there.

But let’s assume that the hypothetical worker that this budget is for can work that many hours indefinitely. The budget assumes a yearly income of about $24,000 after taxes, and that would make it a fairly typical budget for a typical working class American.

In the United States today, 47 percent of all U.S. workers make less than $25,000 a year before taxes. So millions upon millions of U.S. workers are trying to make ends meet each month on very limited incomes.

Does the “McDonald’s Budget” provide any solutions for those workers?

Well, this budget allocates $0 for food, so if you plan on following this budget you might want to anticipate fasting a lot each month.

This budget also allocates $0 for gasoline. So either you will have to ride a bicycle or walk everywhere you go.

This budget does not allocate any money for clothing either. If you really need something to wear, perhaps you can take some cash from the “monthly spending money” category and go down to the local thrift store and get something.

In addition, this budget has no money for water, no money for child care and you might as well forget about saving for retirement. But if you work yourself 70 to 80 hours a week, you probably won’t even make it to retirement age anyway.

So what are some of the things that actually are in the budget?

Well, it allocates $20 a month for health insurance.

Wow – where can I sign up for that health insurance plan?

As the Washington Post noted, nobody is going to be able to get health insurance that cheaply…

Low-income individuals receive assistance from Medicaid, but an after-tax income of $24,720 would put Medicaid out of reach in most states. The same point will likely apply to the subsidies offered by Obamacare: An individual with an income of $17,000 in California will be able to get a basic health insurance plan at no cost, but an individual making $28,000 will have to pay at least $137 per month.

So even a young, healthy person will have to pay $100 or more for an individual health insurance policy in most circumstances. Perhaps McDonalds is tacitly admitting that many low-income workers, including McDonalds employees, can’t afford health insurance and simply make do without it.

The original version of the budget also assumed that the worker would spend zero dollars a month on “heating”.

Perhaps McDonald’s just expects their workers to freeze all winter.

The new version of the budget now allocates $50 a month for heating. Perhaps that may work for the state of Florida, but anyone that lives in a northern state knows that it takes a whole lot more than that just to heat up your home to a level that is barely livable during the winter.

This budget is absolutely crazy. But perhaps even more patronizing then the budget itself is the following statement that is made on the website: “You can have almost anything you want as long as you plan ahead and save for it.”

Oh really?

Do they expect anyone to actually fall for that line?

Don’t get me wrong. Working at McDonald’s is great for some people. I worked there myself when I was in high school. But the vast majority of adult Americans need jobs that will enable them to take care of their families. And those kinds of jobs are rapidly disappearing.

Last month, the U.S. economy lost 240,000 full-time jobs. We are about 6 million full-time jobs below the all-time record that was set back in 2007. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled: “The Decline Of Breadwinner Jobs Has Resulted In The Longest Bread Lines In American History“.

Today, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less. A lot of very talented people are cutting hair, flipping burgers or working for temp agencies. Those people should be doing something that takes advantage of their skills and abilities, but the U.S. economy is not producing enough of those kinds of jobs anymore.

Unfortunately, this is only just the beginning. The next major wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching, and when it strikes unemployment in this country is going to get much worse.

So don’t put all of your faith in the system, because the system is failing. Even if you do have a good job right now, you could lose it at any moment.

Whatever you can do to become more independent of the system is a good thing. For example, starting up a side business is a wonderful thing. It takes a tremendous amount of effort, but nobody can fire you if you are the boss.

My math puts $2000 per month pretty far above the minimum wage. I think an individual who is resourceful can get by just fine on that, but not raise a family.

A shared resource household in this city with four roomates pulling an average of $2000 per month each can live in a decent middle class neighborhood but then you have the sustainability issues of not being able to afford to raise children. I would say that is most of the situation in my neighborhood. The home income requires $2k per person, but whether it's four roomates like at my place or neighbors with professional level jobs and a few kids, that's how it sorts out.

I think the main point of the article was that many people are working 70-80 hours per week at 2 crappy jobs just trying trying to raise a family.

23.3% unemployment is the real deal (and might even be a bit conservative).

7.4% is fed.gov claptrap, and fully expected from the likes of the folks that brought you the Benghazi Caper and the shoot-down of Extortion 17.

Desperate souls use desperate measures.

Revelation 22:13-15

Self employment and don't volunteer to financially support a system which is hostile to your personal economic or civil rights.