Unemployment Discussion

[helpmeout]

It will go back up.

Maybe, maybe not. As stated, and as history has shown, jobs are the last to see the improvement.

But the implication that the numbers were fudged is just plain premature and has no basis in fact. Employers typically hire more people around the holidays.

[sidhesadie]

My dad was in retail management for 30 years, and he was laughing when they announced the new employment number....basically saying well DUH, it's November. It will go up again in Feb. when all the temp holiday employees are let go.

[banca rotta]

The point is the Obama shepard needs to make his sheep think that his programs are working so they gain confidence in this fraud and take your last dollar and spend it on something useless to "help the economy".

Fudging the employment numbers is just part of his scheme. Now he can say he made progress.

[Itsbel62]

As far as unemployment, my husband just got home early tonight after being laid off for the 3rd time in less than a year. The 3rd time is the charm??

We are in a chapter 13 and our atty called today to say that the trustee had said that our plan is "confirmable" and that it will show on the National Data center site in the next few days. At this point we can't even make the mortgage payment let alone the payment to the trustee of $726.25. We have sent an emergency email to the atty to find out what we do at this point. I am frazzled.

[Itsbel62]

sorry...i has repeated my post.

[Itsbel62]

This was written a year ago:

Consumer Debtors Are Looking Forward to Obama as President
Now, with a president-elect who will sign pro-consumer legislation, and with more comfortable Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress, it is possible that some new pro-consumer bankruptcy laws will come quickly."

[momisery]

Our area is suppose to be 9.3% but hub still has not found a paying job, only commission jobs sells nothing to no one.. This all started a long time ago but the downward trend was in 2006. I started seeing loan applications dropping then as people were being laid off. It took a long time to get to this point and it will take a long time to recover. Especially when BOTH parties in our country are all about helping the rich. Ship our jobs out, let illegals in, and remove regulation that protect us so the financial industry could grow and hire people since we were losing so many jobs. I don't get it really. We don't have jobs that pay with a crap for working people, we are hiring illegals and cheap labor, and still they need to push off more and more of the BURDEN of the cost of health care onto us? Prices go up wages go down? makes no sense at all. Being the police to the world has not helped one bit either. We can not afford to protect the world and rebuild other countries after we blow them up.. we should be building our own and putting our people back to work. Did we all waste and want, sure we did, but nothing like those at the top did and got away with.

[JRScott]

The problem is our government if you want to know the truth.

All those nifty trade deals they made over the last two decades, yep they kinda led to this. The removal of vocational training from many high schools yep that contributed to whats about to happen too.

We simply cannot employ our large population without manufacturing jobs. However the cost to run these jobs has risen extraordinarily in the last few decades due to government mandates and unions demanding what is in essence unfair wages and compensation.

We need to bring back import tariffs or we need Unions to realize that the high wages and compensation is what is driving these companies out of the United Staes and that they need to settle for less, in some cases a lot less.

The first will make angry many nations. We have been a consumer nation principally since the 80s though. Its been a long trend, higher tariffs mean you'll pay more for what you buy but might mean your neighbor now has a job. It means we'll have to learn to do with less, and our quality of living will be lower 10 years from implementing it than it is today even though we could employ far more people.

The second the Unions would never willingly agree to. Again you are talking about people learning to do with less to ensure their neighbor has a job. Unfortunately American society at large is about me me me me. It's about paying the least you can for the most stuff even if you never use it. We've got to change that mentality if we are to avoid major economic collapse of the 1870s or 1930s. For the moment they've managed to semi stabilize it but it won't last.

We have another problem coming up as well. Many 20 somethings today have no vocational training. With many of the actual still working factory workers nearing retirement we are going to have a massive shortage of welders, carpenters, metal workers and other vocational jobs which in many cases take just as much skill and training to do as many IT jobs.....just different sorts of skills. In about 10 years we'll be facing that.

So the key is we need higher import tariffs, we need folks who are making what is in essence upper middle class income to realize they have to lower their wages to provide more jobs for the country and we need an educational program to replace the aging workers when the retire.

Without those steps we may never really recover the many lost jobs we have suffered over the last decade.

[momisery]

Actually we have both people working to live on less of a living standard then they did in the 50s with 5-7 kids instead of 2.5. Both work, and we have to use CREDIT to the max to buy things. Some of these things are DEMANDs now too. Like a cell phone for work, or a laptop you have to buy. TV is not free now for many people, and the remaining local channels are total junk. We now pay for TV and we still have to watch ads! I am not sure how to turn this around, but your right we have to pay our people at jobs here in America or we never will. At one time I thought we could all simply stop buying chinese junk, but how can you do that when you can't afford American junk?

[JRScott]

Actually we have both people working to live on less of a living standard then they did in the 50s with 5-7 kids instead of 2.5. Both work, and we have to use CREDIT to the max to buy things. Some of these things are DEMANDs now too. Like a cell phone for work, or a laptop you have to buy. TV is not free now for many people, and the remaining local channels are total junk. We now pay for TV and we still have to watch ads! I am not sure how to turn this around, but your right we have to pay our people at jobs here in America or we never will. At one time I thought we could all simply stop buying chinese junk, but how can you do that when you can't afford American junk?

Cell Phone, Laptop, and Television are not necessities and I don't have any of them.....

See that's the key you have to make it cheap enough to make American goods so that Americans can afford them. In essence they've been using China as slave labor for the last couple of decades. It is why I said to employ our population we need manufacturing, but those jobs have to pay less than they do today so that more people have jobs.

The problem is no politician is going to embrace standing up to the Unions, but it is what is needed. It creates a lot of other problems too such as how on less wages to people afford their homes. Their might need to be some sort of government program to provide housing assistance to those that voluntarily accept lower wages and other benefits.

[momisery]

But a cell phone and laptop are necessary, if hubby is to find a job. Many employers REQUIRE them, and sales jobs do not pay for them for you. Even at the bank where I work the sales staff have their own blackberrys and pay for them, the bank does not pay for them not even the hours.

More people are working because the point was to get women to work because we did not have enough people in the work force. We now have too many because both work, but we have to with the high cost of everything now days. They exported the jobs from the midwest when the energy crisis hit because the big ole factories were too costly to maintain. They moved them to the south with the high cost of heat, and unions or so they said. The south does not have unions, but the wages are still too high for them, so they are moving to China.. at what point do we all live like the Chinese, as slave labor?

I understand what you are saying, but I live in a 1200 sq foot house, I have two cheap paid for cars, we did work until this mess came tumbling down. You can not ask the lower income working class to give up more, we need to make those on the top realize they have to trickle the income down. And I say that because if you put it in the hands of the people they will buy, and create and invent. Put it all in the hands of a few and they invest it in China or Wall street, neither help out the working class in our country.

[JRScott]

You first have to understand that the poorest in America is still rich by the world average. However I was not suggesting that the lower class give up more, it is the middle class (which most unionized factory workers are) and upper class that will have to give up more.

You make a valid point about women entering the workforce. Originally they entered the workforce during WWII to do jobs that the men now at war were no longer around to do. When the men returned many women kept working. This caused a shift in our national economy such that today it is very hard to buy a home or new cars without two incomes. The problem this causes is that if one loses their job they are instantly in economic trouble. I don't see many women willingly moving back to being stay at home moms, Lord knows it would solve some of our social ills but I just don't see it happening. Any politician that suggested such would most likely be removed from office at the next election.

On the move to the south yes most Southern factories are not Unionized and some pay just barely above minimum wage in the Southern United States, however it is still cheaper to pay someone in China their dollar a day and then pay to ship it over in a huge container ship than to pay those wages so that is why you've seen that shift. The problem is the companies and even governments never thought ahead to the time when Americans no longer had good paying jobs and thus could no longer afford such goods. Which we are fast approaching.

[momisery]

We are on the same page here about what has happened. I grew up in the rust belt during the first recession. Gas prices went up and we had gas lines and double digit inflation as well as unemployment. About every other house was up for sale as people lost their incomes. Businesses could not afford to pay the higher cost of heating the space, and the economy was slowing because people were not spending. Business up there was factories mostly, and the buildings were old and drafty. A good number of them decided since they would have to insulate or rebuild they might as well look around for cheaper wages and land. Instantly a flood of tax breaks were offered to have them move to the south and southwest. Prior to that was the civil war where the south was burned down and made a poor area. They had not really recovered, and the managers I worked with at that time still believed that the south was not prosperous because they were lazy and the "Good" ones moved north to find work. Many workers believed that too. When the move came about the rust belt was destoryed. It was not so much about wages, but the gas and heating oil prices and old buildings that drove the businesses out. The good of those better wages is still evident today. The top 10 high schools are in 9 of the old rust belt/norther states because the taxes were higher and they put a lot into their schools.

And being female I will agree that women working did bring about a change in prices. But the idea was to help support single family households and it caught on fast across the board. You can have a nicer home, more stuff and two new cars if you both worked. Now, you both work and they have jacked the prices up so high that you are in the hole unless your both professionals with degrees. Pretty hard to educate working boomers as they are older, growing a bit weaker, and have struggled to pay for college for their kids, medicare/ss for the elderly, and for several wars now and endured recessions. A re training of the whole nation would result in a lot more burger jobs having college degress. We need jobs, and ones that pay. If you are willing to work you should make enough to live, save, pay for health and dental care, raise a modest family, have transportation etc. When my folks bought the farm they had 7 kids one income from the factory and had just paid off some huge medical bills ( a death at birth, the funeral, etc) and we bought a tv just after we moved. Today, a factory work can not save enough to buy a farm like that for extra income or a small motel like a friends parents did for extra income. We have always been a better nation because we all shared in the wealth, now they don't want to share.

[Xue]

"Real" Unemployment Could Surge to 25%, Portfolio Manager Says

http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/435911/%22Real%22-Unemployment-Could-Surge-to-25%25,-Portfolio-Manager-Says

Depression level unemployment...here's what JJ Luna writes:

THE FASTEST WAY TO FIND A OTHER JOB

In the late summer of 1988, I met Eduardo Garza-Aldape. He had just arrived from the Mexican state of Chiapas. Unlike an American looking for a job, Eduardo had two strikes against him: he could speak only a few hundred words of English, and he had no legal permission to work. Our conversation was in Spanish. Translated:

“Since you don’t have a job yet Eduardo, I’d like to come by about
2:00 p.m. and—”

“No, I work from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.”

“I thought you didn’t have a job yet.”

“My job is to find a job. I go out every day and stop by places where they might need some help. Some days I walk maybe six miles or more but the bosses, they get to see me every week. They see I am trying hard. And when a job comes up, they will remember me when I stop by again.”

Two weeks later, Eduardo was given a job by a home builder. He cleaned up the debris left at each of the builder’s projects. His was not an atypical case.

My wife and I are currently involved in volunteer work with Hispanics, and we see this again and again. Some relative arrives from Chiapas, Oaxaca, or Guadalajara and within weeks he finds a job. Not the kind of job you would take perhaps, but he does find a JOB. So what can you learn from the above?

Until you find employment, your job will be to head out every morning and talk to the owners or managers of places where you think you might possibly qualify. Unlike Eduardo, you will almost certainly have a vehicle so spread out in ever-widening circles, perhaps up to an hour’s commute from where you live.

Dress for the sort of job you are applying for, or dress a little better. If you are a man: shoes shined, fresh haircut, no beard. If a woman: modest dress, no perfume, subdued makeup. Have a card printed up, preferably with your picture, and leave it everywhere you stop.

An older single man who lives in a truck (and has more cash at the end of the month than many of his peers do) has this to say about finding work:
“I use Craigslist to both look for work, and to offer my services.

There are a lot of work opportunities among home owners for a skilled craftsman and Craigslist is the way to find them! One thing that's hard for people with real houses to understand is that living in a truck, I can cut nearly all of my monthly bills out so I don't have to work 40 hour weeks, 50 weeks a year. Without the pressure, work seems to come along when I need it.”

CRAIGSLIST

If you haven’t yet tried Craigslist, now is the time to start. Craigslist is a website offering free classified advertisements for jobs, housing, for sale/barter/wanted, and has forums sorted by various topics. The site receives over 500,000 new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.

A better solution however, may be to go into business for yourself.

There are two ways to pick up some cash within 12 to 24 hours: Either you borrow it or you sell something. I have intimate experience with both.

Pawn something Never mind that you’ll only get about 15 percent of what the pawn shop can sell the item for. The main thing is that there is no penalty if you do not pay. They just keep whatever you pawned. (On average, three out of every four loans are repaid.) Typical loans average
between $70 and $100 although they can be as small as $20 or as high as several thousand dollars (depending on the value of the collateral).

In 1950, when I was selling health and accident insurance to farmers in Montana, I met a band leader from California named Chuck Berry (not the Chuck Berry). His doctor had ordered him to get out of the music business before he died from alcohol and drugs. Chuck had driven up to Montana
to fish the Madison and he’d brought some extra band instruments along. I purchased a 1944 Martin tenor guitar from him for $40. Whenever sales were slow I pawned the guitar but then I worked even harder to make sure I got it back. I no longer play the guitar but I still have that Martin and I’ve added an upscale Taylor as well. The two guitars are a friendly reminder that if our cash ever runs short, I can still get a loan at the pawn shop!

--How To Survive The Loss Of Your Savings, Your Job, and Your Home. by JJ Luna

http://www.howtobeinvisible.com/index.cfm/page/home

Detroit homes sell for $1 amid mortgage and car industry crisis
One in five houses left empty as foreclosures mount and property prices drop by 80%

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/02/detroit-homes-mortgage-foreclosures-80

[Xue]

Unemployment is rising and so are gas prices!!! lol

Gasoline heading above $3 a gallon by this summer

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100222/ap_on_bi_ge/oil_prices

Prices are climbing even after millions of Americans received pink slips and kept their cars in the driveway.