"Hard Numbers: The Economy is Worse than You Know" [full article for Harper's subscribers, a different abridged version] discusses how the Consumer Price Index and other US economic statistics have been manipulated over time. Among other things, the article claims, these changes make Social Security checks 70% lower than they would otherwise be. [more inside]
posted by salvia on May 5, 2008 - 73 comments

The Financial Services industry has seen it before; massive job cuts after the dot com collapse of 2001 forced many out of the business, some permanently. [more inside]
posted by Mutant on May 1, 2008 - 34 comments

Doing More With Less: In Defense of Creative Loafing I’ve been on unemployment three times in the past six years. Each time was better than the last, and each time I stayed on until the last cent was exhausted. I didn’t even try to get a job; it was a paid vacation. This is somewhat unusual from what I can tell. There’s a deep vein of antipathy in this country toward collecting checks from the government, especially in precincts that tend to skew rightward. Politicians imply that it’s un-American for an individual to milk the government, all while jacking up corporate welfare for their campaign contributors. And your uncle who cheered at the end of Easy Rider? He insists that if he had to obliterate 40 years of his life punching a clock, why should you goddamn hippies have it any better?
posted by jason's_planet on Mar 11, 2008 - 107 comments

TheDataWeb - a network of online data libraries on topics including census data, economic data, health data, income and unemployment data, population data, labor data, cancer data, crime and transportation data, family dynamics, vital statistics data
posted by Gyan on Dec 26, 2007 - 10 comments

Never wanna work/Always wanna play/Pleasure, pleasure every day. What happens when the jobs go away and don't return? Should we take the surpluses generated and pay people not to work? What happens to the assumption of scarcity when nanotechology allows us to generate potentially anything we want from grass clippings? Maybe Marx had it wrong all along. Maybe, instead of fetishizing work and the authoritarian mindset that it generates, we should have been reading Paul Lafargue instead. Just as a thought experiment, what would you do if your job category disappeared? How would you spend your time? Would you invest more time and energy in friendships and other relationships? Hobbies? If you were your employer, what technologies would you use to get rid of your position and save money?
posted by jason's_planet on Jun 25, 2006 - 43 comments

Bush's "pepperoni" defence of outsourcing. "India's middle class is buying air-conditioners, kitchen appliances and washing machines, and a lot of them from American companies like GE and Whirlpool and Westinghouse. And that means their job base is growing here in the United States. Younger Indians are acquiring a taste for pizzas from Domino's, Pizza Hut..."
posted by insomnia_lj on Feb 23, 2006 - 90 comments

General Motors is cutting 9% of their workforce. Some fear it is too little, too late. Chicago Tribune fear this is only the beginning. Detroit News has an FAQ for those affected. A sad day for the US automotive industry indeed.
posted by SharQ on Nov 22, 2005 - 79 comments

Ahhhh Germany 1933 German unemployment surged to 5.04 million, the highest since the 1993 and the dark days surrounding the rise of Adolf Hitler, according to data released on Wednesday by the Federal Labour Office. Ominous sign of things to come?
posted by halekon on Feb 2, 2005 - 41 comments

“If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits”

Prostitution was legalized in Germany just over two years ago, and brothel owners, who must pay tax and employee health insurance, have been granted access to official government databases of jobseekers and have equal status with any other employer. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse. Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job or lose her unemployment benefit.

“There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry. The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits.”
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood on Jan 30, 2005 - 119 comments

Dick Cheney claims that disappointing jobs numbers are undercounting ebay power sellers. The man is on a tear!
posted by luser on Sep 10, 2004 - 47 comments

Saudization is the process of hiring Saudi Arabian nationals to join the Saudi workforce and is an interesting counterpoint to the US phenomena of outsourcing. The goal of Saudization is to discourage reliance on foreign workers as well as to combat domestic unemployment, which is worsened by the rapidly swelling ranks of restive, undereducated youth. Unfortunately it's not as easy to put into practice as it sounds.
posted by rks404 on Apr 19, 2004 - 3 comments

This is a very depressing time to exist, it seems. Watching the country you love (or hate) slowly disintegrate makes me wonder about how it all felt before.
posted by psychotic_venom on Mar 16, 2004 - 26 comments

A Frank and Sobering interview with Milton Friedman In fact, all of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. (via Econlog)
posted by trharlan on Sep 17, 2003 - 50 comments

The day the dinnertime phone calls stopped. We've previously discussed the new national do-not-call list on Mefi, but this Salon piece puts a new spin on the subject. Millions of rural Americans will inevitably lose telemarketing jobs because telemarketing will be regulated out of business. But the government isn't regulating them out of business, it is just providing a way for people to choose not to participate in this business scheme. The people who add their names to the list are the people who are going to hang up in the telelmarketer's face anyways, so where's the harm in this list? And what about the DMA's 10 reasons to protect the teleservices industry?
posted by archimago on Jul 15, 2003 - 64 comments

There are 8.8 million people unemployed in the United States. Unemployment is measured annually as the percent of the labor force that cannot find a job. The labor force comprises adults who want to work. Uncounted are those who do not seek employment, or who have become discouraged enough to stop looking.
posted by The Jesse Helms on May 15, 2003 - 27 comments

The change in private employment, two years after recession began, for 1953 to Present.
Details: The jobless recovery continued in March 2003 as the nation's payrolls contracted by 108,000, according to report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). These losses are in addition to last month's payroll declines, which also were revised up to 357,000. Taken together, the economy has lost 465,000 jobs in the past two months. In the two years since the recession began in March 2001, total payrolls have fallen by 2.1 million and private sector payrolls are down by 2.6 million.
The Jobless Recovery.
Low growth accompanies record trade deficit:
Last month in Beijing, Robert Zoellick, President George W. Bush's international trade ambassador, had nothing but praise for China's growing trade surplus. Meanwhile in St. Louis in January, the president stumped for more tax cuts, standing before a facade of boxes with the words "Made in China" covered over in tape.
2001 Tax Cuts and the Proposed 2003 Cuts
Details: Discarding pretense of tax cut equity
Also: Economists Voice Opposition to Bush Tax Cuts
posted by y2karl on Apr 16, 2003 - 43 comments

"This is getting ridiculous!" complained one veteran programmer on USENET a bit over two years ago... after being out of the workforce for a while, he was having trouble getting back in the door. While there's no way to put yourself in his prospective employers shoes and make a real judgement, it looks like he had the chops. Wonder how he's doing today...general conditions don't seem good, and I know several people with the same problem. The longer a period of unemployment goes, the worse your resume looks, and the harder it is to get a job. How do you break the cycle (from either a policy or a jobseeker standpoint)?
posted by namespan on Jan 4, 2003 - 29 comments

17 million Latin American people out of work Claimed to be the highest level since 1980. How much longer, or how many more, until nations revert to Che Guevarra or Pinochet and the US to the CIA and intervention? Will history repeat itself, or has history paved the way for an alternative outcome?
posted by Voyageman on Dec 10, 2002 - 27 comments

Hunger rates highest in rural West. "Unemployment and prevalence of seasonal labor go hand-in-hand with hunger, experts say. Oregon, Washington and Alaska rank high in both jobless and hunger rates. Across the West, the agriculture industry relies on seasonal labor to harvest everything from mushrooms to apples. Families that work in the summer often can't make ends meet in the winter."
posted by crasspastor on Dec 3, 2002 - 6 comments

Despite efforts to save it, the last major U.S. shirt manufacturing plant has closed. The Hathaway factory had been around since 1853 and had once produced shirts for the Union Army in the Civil War. Most of the 235 women let go had spent more than a decade working there. Cutting fabric and stitching garments was their marketable skill. Retraining isn't an option because these workers will have to find immediate employment. And if this hard reality isn't enough, to be eligible for severance pay, each worker must sign an nondisparagement agreement and promise not to hold Hathaway responsible for liabilities or damages. Why does free trade have to work this way?
posted by ed on Oct 22, 2002 - 47 comments

Facing Serial Unemployment, it's Time for a New Game Plan. Anyone else frustrated with jobs that disappear out from under them? What is the "new game plan" that works? (Say an unemployed person realizes that these Boston Globe articles disappear just as fast as their jobs do. In solidarity with other unemployed workers, they violate copyright and cache this article on a website. Do we prosecute?)
posted by sheauga on Jul 19, 2002 - 4 comments

Unemployed people are supposed to be actively looking for work, not spending all of their time answering e-mail, drawing cartoons and getting interviewed on television about being unemployed. So there is a good chance Todd Rosenberg, creator of oddtodd.com and "Laid Off: A Day in the Life," will be asked to repay the last seven weeks of his unemployment benefits.
posted by tranquileye on Feb 27, 2002 - 13 comments

Laid Off?
So I was thinking about all the people laid off from dot.coms, and people laid off from places like LTV, luckily I’m not in either group as of yet, but I wonder about the differences. On one hand, the dot.bombers still have their computers, the web is there, so are some jobs, and the possibility of free lance work is always bobbing around, but the glory days are behind us. Steel workers, on the other hand, well… the plant is gone, they can’t open another plant in their basement, plus to make things worse, they are probably older, and less educated, it seems harder to find work.
Who has it worse, and with the current economy, will things get even worse for all of us?
posted by Blake on Jan 8, 2002 - 18 comments

Unemployment Rate Jumps! The unemployment rate had its largest jump in 21 years as fallout from the WTC continues to sweep through the economy. Service, Hotel, Travel and Retail jobs most affected by layoffs.
posted by Lanternjmk on Nov 2, 2001 - 21 comments

The Mullings Plan for Global Economic Recovery - Would this plan effectively stimulate the economy and also benefit the world at large? What do you think will get us out of this slump?
posted by revbrian on Sep 9, 2001 - 11 comments

Staff shortages are rife in the UK. University staff, midwives, teachers, police, pretty much every profession (especially unskilled).
 
In nearly every shop or workplace I've walked past in the past few weeks I've seen 'Staff Wanted' signs galore. Too many jobs, not enough workers. With the lowest unemployment rate in 20 years, and average pay rises of 5% per year, is there any hope of filling these positions anytime soon?
posted by wackybrit on Jun 22, 2001 - 22 comments