Even the Worst Jobs are Better than Nothing
Some fluff in the article, but some interesting points:
Some of the dirtiest, smelliest, most dangerous jobs are suddenly looking a lot more appealing in this economy.
People who have been out of work for months are lining up for jobs at places they once considered unthinkable: slaughterhouses, sewage plants, prisons…
The desperation of the long-term jobless has rippled through the labor force. More skilled and educated workers have filled clerical or restaurant jobs. So unskilled workers such as teenagers or high school graduates who once held most of those positions have displaced those even lower on the economic ladder, such as immigrants, Freedman noted.
The intensified competition has hurt all workers - even those who are still employed - because it shrinks wages. Employers don’t have to pay more to lure workers.
“It’s easy for someone like your middle manager to take on a job at a poultry plant, because they have the skills to do many things. But for the immigrant, that might have been the only option,” said Catherine Singley of the National Council of La Raza, an immigrant advocacy group in Washington.
Not true. It has hurt unskilled workers disproportionately because they are easily replaced. Skilled workers are not feeling the pinch, especially in areas in high demand and that require high skills.
To make matter’s worse, let’s say that three years ago, you had three workers earning $5.15 an hour. That is $15.45 an hour worth of labor. Now, you are forced to have two workers do the same job for $7.25 an hour. I know that $5.15 an hour really sucked ass and $7.25 isn’t great either, but the reality is that unemployment is that the unemployment rate for those age 18-19 is 23.2%. The unemployment rate for those 20-24 is 15.4%.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea13.txt
You can break things down further. The age group 16-24 that are not enrolled in school (dropouts age 16-24) do not have a high school diploma have an unemployment rate of 29.6% and those that do have a high school diploma are at 21.4%.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea16.txt
The prospects for this age group and this education group are the most dire. They are squeezed by the minimum wage on one side and by folks with more skills, education, experience or just older people on the other. When people that have some college or people that are older and have more experience come along, they get the jobs. And with fewer minimum wage and entry level positions, competition is stiff.
Go one step farther and look at the unemployment rate for married folks, age 25 or older, all levels of educational attainment and you will find that the unemployment rate is you will find that the rate is 6.4% for men and 5.9% for women.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea29.txt
While the employment situation sucks in general, it sucks a lot less for married folks over age 25. There are 2.2M unemployed, never married men age 16-24 and there are another 1.7M unemployed never married women age 16-24. That is out of the total 15M unemployed.
I am not going to point solely to minimum wage laws, but I will say that if the minimum wage was lower, more of these unmarried workers under age 24 would have jobs. With all the rhetoric about single women trying to raise families on minimum wage, which is a fallacy, Dems failed to point out that it would put millions of teens and young adults with low job skills on the unemployment line.
But when you add in the folks that are older and more skilled taking their jobs on top of it, it is a recipe for all kinds of ills as our friends in France found out.
