Will recovery come down to jobs?

I’m back. Sorry it’s been so long boys and girls but the Bear is out of hibernation. Looks like just in time to see a mountain of trouble starting to poke it’s peak out of the snow. Ok, that analogy sucked but I’m getting back into the flow.

Here’s a section taken from MSNBC’s column:
“The economy is strengthening, and will likely grow at a faster pace this year as more confident consumers and companies spend more, Bernanke said in prepared remarks to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. But he warned that the growth won't be strong enough to quickly drive down high unemployment, and it could take several years before it returns to more normal levels.
“Until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established,” he said.”

Well, it’s now February 3rd and finally I hear a bit of truth / fact coming out of Washington. Not that it matters. None of the people in charge or talking heads will come out and say the truth. WE’RE SCREWED. Maybe I’m being a little over dramatic but things are not good.

article

I feel justified that someone has backed up my claim that nothing is going to help this economy except for job creation. I’d go even further by saying we not only need job creation but GOOD jobs created. We need jobs to replace middle class jobs that we’ve been loosing over the past two decades. It’s been a coffee like drip for years but until this latest crash of layoffs it seems that everyone has opened their eyes to the fact that the middle class and the middle class job has been sent elsewhere.

We can create all the McDonald jobs we want but none of them are going to replace Ford jobs that a single employee can support their family. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always heard about jobs going overseas or to Mexico. It’s just now that things are starting to crash or people are noticing. I’m sure it has to do with the whole, “well it’s not happening to me so why should I care” mentality. Let’s call it the discount or Wall-Mart theory.

I’m not going to get into Unions VS Big Business and who’s caused what or reasons for workers making less and doing more. That’s for another post. Let’s just look at one example. I used to have a job at a Supermarket. One of the best reasons for working there was because of the great benefits. I was young and didn’t care or use these health benefits like many of the older workers or even how I would need them now, but they where good. I knew if anything happened I was taken care of. Well with the cost of health care going up and the “loss of profits” that the supermarkets where receiving, the health care that’s now provided to new workers is a fraction of what we used to have. And you have to work longer and harder to get to where you’re covered decently.

If you added 1 cent to everything at the market and put that towards heath care for the employees I bet the quality of life for the employees would increase and the quality of employee would increase because good workers would know that they’d be taken care of. What would the cost to the customers be? Even on a huge order, $1 or $2 maybe $3?

I see this as a three problem answer.

1) We don’t see the benefit
- We don’t hear about the horror stories that go on because of a lack of medical coverage. We see it when the grocery workers go on strike but what are they striking for. These workers need better ad men to sell us on why we should care, why it may cost us a little more and why it in the end benefits us.

2) We go for cheaper which in turn makes business cut from the workers
- That discount today may cost you your job tomorrow. Overly simplistic but over time it’s true. You keep needing the lowest price and going to the Wall-Mart’s of the world for everything, it’s going to eventually affect you. Unless there are means and ways to stop certain plateaus from being hit (which I don’t claim to know, this is for much smarter economic minds) the over search for cheaper goods will come back to bite you. If by finding cheaper workers and / or paying them less is going to be how a market lowers it’s prices then that will snowball into lower wages for employees who then will not be able to afford the things they need to buy who will look for cheaper homes who will spend less on cars, and so on. I’m not talking about a coupon sale. I’m talking about a total cut to costs, which almost always affects the employees (except the highest levels of management who’ll still make more year after year), that pushes down the average worker so that the grocery can sell toilet paper for 1 – 5 cents cheaper and get people to come to their market. Wal-Mart pays people with lower money and less benefits so they can offer cheaper prices.

3) It’s too late until it’s gone and affects us
- Touching back on the first answer, on average we won’t react until it’s too late. By the time jobs going out of this country really hit us, we where past the point of doing anything about it. Then when it’s your job that gets cut you sit there with your pink slip and wonder why you didn’t do anything before. It’s either human or animal nature to only care about your own situation. I bet it’s a higher form of living if you can think out what ramifications will happen if event “A” starts and you try to see what will unfold. No one hopes or expects their neighbor to loose a job but I wonder how many trips to Wal-Mart did it take to have Ralph’s workers make less and get less on benefits?

We’re a long way from recovery. The word in the street seems bleak. I will say that if anything, it’s encouraging to at least hear someone in the government say the words, WE NEED MORE JOBS. Now what will come next?