481,000 people lost their jobs last month. 3,843,000 officially unemployed. The official unemployment rate is 6.1%. The *unofficial* unemployment rate -- the U-6 measure -- is at 11%.
Getting Americans back working again is going to be job #1 for an Obama administration. We will have to see how he handles this. One thing is clear, the old rubric of "retraining" is not going to work this time. The new computer jobs are going to programmers in India and China, not to programmers here in the United States, so even if all these unemployed people could be re-trained to have computer skills (which many of them can't -- it takes a certain mindset that can't be easily taught), they aren't going to be working in the computer industry. And re-training them to be "sandwich artists" would be just a cruel joke.
-- Badtux the Economics Penguin
I have plenty of skills and live cheap so I'm not affected by it like many will be.
ReplyDeleteYou are just on the the tip of the ice burg and it isn't going to refreeze.
I don't care where computer jobs go, they help others eat no matter where they are and I don't depend on them for my food.
How many TV's are made in this country? You may as well bitch about them not being made here.
In fact a hell of a lot of your Jeep and motorcycle wasn't made in this country. But you bought them anyway.
Am I to assume that you expect Obama to fix capitalism and capitalist greed? I hope that they don't hold it against him when he can't.
On my walk to the office this morning, I was thinking something similar (it's a 15 minute walk and my mind has a tendency to wander). What to do with people who are on disability. I'm not talking about people who are handicapped but people who are simply unable to perform manual labor yet do not have the capacity for a white collar job.
ReplyDeleteThis ties in with the people who are recently unemployed. While a good portion of these people are blue collar, white collar workers are being cut as well. Today, AMD let 500 go and you can't go a week following Slashdot and not see some other tech firm letting people go.
I would be interested in seeing what the incoming administration has in mind on how to help these people as I cannot think of anything.